Fear of Fear: A Survey of Terrorist Operations and Controls in Open Societies

Abstract

speed with which political information is transmitted to a mass audience. Yet television newscasting, in adhering to conventions of fairness or balance and reflecting the Progressives' distrust of political party, tends to promulgate anti-partisan views of politics, a tendency most pronounced in its depicting the primary process as the genuinely democratic way of nominating presidents. The effect, says Rubin, has been to grease the downward slide of parties in the political process. The bureaucratic specialization of the print press, he might have added, facilitates dissemination of demands by non-party groups in the polity. One consequence of the new politics has been a succession of one-term presidents, each enjoying only brief moments of political effectiveness. The author traces the weakened presidency to an erosion of what Neustadt calls prestige, the perception in the eyes of Washingtonians of how their publics-and the president's-are likely to react to the president's acts in office. (It is often confused with popularity, as measured by the president's approval or disapproval rating in the Gallup poll.) Without a stable base for public prestige in party loyalty, presidential popularity has become very volatile. More broadly, presidents today suffer from the lack of correspondence among the coalition they need for getting the nomination, the coalition they need for gaining election, and the coalition they need for governing, once in office. One possible response to this new political environment is the traditional favorite of political science: a disciplined and responsible party government. That was, more or less, the response of the Reaganauts, who ran for election on a set of national themes with centralized financing. The election of 1980 was the triumph of party organization, not of single-issue groups. Rubin's book, in directing attention away from the direct political effects of the news media and toward their indirect effects, especially on institutions, addresses a significant set of questions, propounds a concisely and provocatively stated thesis, and performs a service for those who teach, study, and practice American politics in the 1980s.